He wrote to a friend in 1915, “My defence at any Last Judgement would be ‘I was trying to connect up and use all the fragments I was born with.’ ” But it was not easy, and particularly when it came to the difficulty of being honest about being gay—the context for his remark. Homosexual acts were still illegal in Britain; Forster, having written a novel called Maurice, about a gay man very much like himself,
